The Reunion

The clearing under the overpass and on top of the old railroad track was a spot to be reclaimed. It wasn’t the way Isaac remembered it, the way it had felt when he was a sophomore in high school.

Private. His, hers, swimming with promise, and magic, and life. It was still overgrown as ever. Shoots of wild grasses that came to his knees had encroached even farther into the gravel barrier that protected the track from the natural forces that had always threatened to break it down. To wash away this unused, unkempt mark of ancient human engineering. The roaring of the overpass above was the only thing that anchored him to reality, the only thing that reminded him that the clearing was just a tiny crevice in an industrial world and not the expanse of it.

As he paced the track, up and down, back and forth, because it was the only place you could walk in shorts without being eaten alive by mosquitoes and latched onto by ticks, he wondered why he bothered coming back anymore. It had been a decade, and it felt like lifetimes had passed since it had been his. Then the ten-year high school reunion had come and gone, and she hadn’t shown, and he wondered why he was the only one stuck in this loop. Wishing for days that had felt like more, which wasn’t fair to the days that were now. The days he spent with his niece, and his brother, and his girlfriend, and his parents.

The past was some powerful kind of magic. It felt full in a way that the present didn’t, as if every moment of then had been teeming with something that he couldn’t quite grab hold of now. So he’d started coming back, week in and week out.

He walked the tracks every Friday after work, thinking, sometimes sitting and drawing, sometimes just staring at the moss that clung to the wood of the tracks, and the rust that had eaten away at the rails. Occasionally he ran into kids spray painting the thick concrete struts of the overpass, and when that happened he stayed, ignoring them until they left. But there was a couple, two boys, who he’d seen kissing under the bridge once, and whenever he saw them, he always left. He didn’t want to intrude on their illusion of secrecy. Even if that meant letting them think that this place, his place that meant so much to him, was theirs.

But today there had been no one, that is, no one until he’d spotted her. Coming in off the roadside, her hair gleaming copper, even at a distance. She walked towards him until she spotted him and froze, the two of them still half a football field apart.

She didn’t look the way he’d imagined she would, as she had looked, the many times that he’d envisioned this exact scenario. He’d imagined long curled hair, and a yellow sundress, sandals, and painted nails. It was a version of Meg, though not one that had ever really existed.

The Meg he hadn’t seen in years didn’t look the same up close, he was sure, but she was dressed the way she would’ve been for a summer day on the tracks all those years ago. Short khaki shorts, and a flowy off-white blouse, sneakers on her feet, and her red hair, which she’d never fully appreciated even then, strangled into a tight topknot.

“Isaac?” She called from across the way, and he waved dumbly back.

They walked towards each other, rough prairie grasses tearing at their calves, and when they met in the middle Meg wrapped him in a quick loose hug, “What are the odds?” She asked, her sunny smile spreading across her freckled face like oil over water.

Isaac shrugged. He wasn’t about to admit how often he’d been visiting the past couple of months.

“It looks the same, doesn’t it?” She asked. It didn't, not to him, and maybe that was the difference between them. All he could see was how things had changed, but maybe Meg saw the world in a continuity. Past bleeding to present, life not skipping forward in observed intervals, or trapped in moments, but something that carried on when she was away.

Some things hadn't changed though, she still talked with her hands, throwing her arms wide as she looked out at the expanse before them. As she did a golden band on her finger caught the light. 

He’d known that she’d gotten engaged, but still, he’d expected to be overwhelmed with jealousy if he’d ever seen it, the ring, the life, for himself.

He wasn’t.

Some sort of sadness did cling, the teenage boy layered under the ten freshly passed years holding to the memory of a life they could’ve had together. But the new part of him, the part that had been built over years apart, new people, new places, smiled for her. “Congrats on the engagement.” He said.

And she beamed at him, her smile so wide and bright that for a moment she eclipsed the sun, “Thanks, Isaac.”

He led her around, showed her with a flourish of his arms the new graffiti over the old, the place where Jack and Cassie had once carved their initials, still intact. And he told jokes that didn’t make her laugh, and she said things that he didn’t understand, and his image of the world they’d once built in this place together crumbled around him. The thems that had once known each other inside out, the quiet boy, the loud, angry girl, they were gone.

And the strangest part was that he was okay with that. They walked together talking, and then sat together in silence until the sun started to lower in the sky, and Isaac texted his girlfriend to let her know where he was and who he was with. He called Meg an old friend in the text, and somehow that was true.

“Why didn’t you come to the reunion?” He asked as they walked back to their cars.

She didn’t answer at first, focused on catching a firefly. As she snatched it out of the air, cupping it carefully in her palms, she said, “I was in Europe, and besides, I don’t miss high school.”

“Not ever?” He asked because he did. Sometimes so intensely it hurt.

“Well,” She said, “Parts of it I guess, but none of those memories are really about the school,” The light of the firefly seeped out between her fingers in a rhythmic bob, and the finished thought hung between them. They held those memories here. The both of them.

And in another life, an older one, he would’ve tried to kiss her. Actually, in that older life, she would’ve kissed him, but even as the thought occurred to him he knew it was only an echo.

“Goodbye Isaac,” She said as she climbed into her car.

“Goodbye Meg,” He said as she closed the door.

And though he climbed into his car until she’d driven away, after her headlights disappeared over the ridge he lumbered back out into the moon-soaked field. He stayed until the roaring overpass lulled to a hum. Until the world fell asleep. Then he walked back to his car knowing he’d never return to this place. To everything, it had once held. And as he drove away, he felt the place slipping until it was no longer his, now just another place he’d once belonged.